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IBM and the Raptors: Building an NBA champion and looking for a repeat

While watching the NBA’s defending champion Toronto Raptors
begin their season, I thought back to a trip to IBM’s Toronto office in late
summer 2018, where we got to play with the technology IBM built for the
Raptors’ draft and trade war room. We created teams, selecting college players,
current NBA players and even European league all-stars based on stats and
contracts, influenced a bit by our own biases (toward the Celtics). And when we
visited IBM Toronto again in 2019, when the Raptors were on the march to the
playoffs and a championship, we understood that IBM’s technology had made a
huge difference in pulling together an underappreciated, under-the-radar team.
IBM’s combination of massive amounts of data, AI and a near-flawless user
interface allowed the Raptors’ management team to put the right pieces in place
to unseat the Warriors. Will the Raptors repeat? Unlikely, but they’re still
partnering with IBM.

Later this month, we’re going to publish a special report on IBM’s role with the Raptors in the context of other consultancies and IT services vendors that have invested in analytics and sports, building on the following assessment from our Digital Transformation Insights Report: Cross Vendor, published in March.

“In 2016 IBM partnered with the NBA’s Toronto Raptors to
create a ‘war room’ for the NBA draft, pulling together an exhaustive and
diverse set of performance, personality and biological data on basketball
players in the league, in college, and around the world.

Leveraging a user-centric design approach, IBM worked
with the Raptors’ front office to develop an end-to-end platform that
revolutionizes the operations experience and provides them with comprehensive
and actionable data about players to support front-office decision-making
processes.

IBM worked with the Raptors to gather player performance
statistics and contract details, allowing the Raptors to get an instant view of
all aspects of player performance and the ability to search and filter players,
compare players, simulate trade scenarios, and collaborate with decision makers
throughout the player recruitment and acquisition processes — how did a player
do and what would it cost to have him play in Toronto.

The IBM Sports Insights Central solution was built over
six months using a collaborative and agile model. The platform includes a
state-of-the-art digital war room located at the Raptors’ facility as well as a
mobile application and a web-based service to enable remote collaboration.

The IBM team synthesized and visualized all aspects of
player data through an intuitive and highly functional user experience to make
this a transformative engagement for IBM and the Raptors. Since the solution
deployed, IBM has assisted the Raptors by further enhancing the functionality
of the platform with scouting management, players’ social media profiles, and
analytics provided by the IBM Watson AI engine via a native mobile app.”

(The Raptors started their title defense with a 130-122 win
over the Pelicans.)

Strong investments by webscales and China-based telcos will carry the telecom infrastructure services (TIS) market through the COVID-19 crisis relatively intact, with a shallow decline of relatively short duration expected in the overall market followed by a robust, sustained recovery as CSPs in other key countries accelerate their infrastructure initiatives to align with the new […]

Strong investments by webscales and China-based telcos will carry the telecom infrastructure services (TIS) market through the COVID-19 crisis relatively intact, with a shallow decline of relatively short duration expected in the overall market followed by a robust, sustained recovery as CSPs in other key countries accelerate their infrastructure initiatives to align with the new […]